Tomorrow is the last of the scheduled week-end budget “workshops” being held by the Park Ridge City Council (8:30 a.m., 505 Butler Place).  The main topic will be the Public Works Dept., which is the City department in charge of maintaining our streets, alleys, sidewalks, and our sewer and water systems.  That department is also scheduled for more cuts.

These workshops haven’t been fun, and they haven’t been entertaining – unless you have a sick and twisted taste in entertainment.  But budgeting, and operating within the limits of that budget, is where the rubber of government meets the road.  And the inability of our federal, state and local governments to do that for decades is what has put us in the middle of a perfect economic storm that threatens to capsize local government as we have come to know it.

But maybe that’s a good thing.

Because for the first time since the Great Depression the public is starting to look seriously at the size, the cost, the bloat and the waste of government at all levels.  Such scrutiny is especially good at the local level, where our elected representatives are far more accessible than those at the higher end of the governmental food chain.  And the public is becoming increasingly skeptical of government programs – and government subsidization of private programs – that promise far more than they actually deliver, or deliver amenities instead of necessities when the taxpayers are struggling to pay for their own necessities.

City Mgr. Jim Hock was given a thankless task, but one that was part of his job description when he took over the position from his bumbling but tricky predecessor, Tim Schuenke, two years ago.  Hock delivered the most ambitious budget in recent memory, filled with cuts and a property tax increase that still came up $227,000 out of balance. 

Just last Saturday, however, state Rep. Rosemary Mulligan warned the Council that Park Ridge is likely to lose $900,000+ of income tax revenues from the State of Illinois, even as she was lobbying for the City Council to throw more cash at private community groups that have come to rely on an easy annual hand-out from the City.  That’s the way they do it down in Springfield, which is one of the reasons our state’s finances are in shambles.

So, at least for the time being, consider the proposed budget as having a deficit of $1.1 million.  And change.

Back in his day, Schuenke used to fill those deficits simply by making up higher revenue numbers – which clueless and compliant mayor(s) and aldermen were happy to accept so that they wouldn’t have to make the tough decisions of cutting personnel or services, or raising taxes beyond what they felt the public would accept without too much grumbling.  Which pretty much explains almost an entire decade of annual deficits, along with an Uptown TIF that has failed to live up to its lofty promises.

You can spend an hour or two this weekend sitting around with friends and praising or bemoaning Obama-care, or gay marriage, or the undeclared war on terror, or all those other things that occur on the federal level over which you have not one speck of control.  Or, you can stop over at City Hall tomorrow morning and participate in some real boots-on-the-ground government that you actually have a chance of influencing.

Otherwise, you will deserve what you get.